Hockey Bytes: Lightning Strikes Back
How an aging dynasty, seemingly in decline, found a second wind. Plus, which Team USA was best?
Welcome to Hockey Bytes — a weekly NHL column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various hockey spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Hockey Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🧊 Tampa’s Flash of Resurgence
A few years ago, the Tampa Bay Lightning seemed like a perfect illustration of how NHL parity can pull any team — even a dynasty — back down to earth.
Tampa Bay had easily been the league’s most dominant team of the late 2010s and early 2020s, tying the single-season record for wins in 2018-19 (we won’t talk about what happened in the playoffs), hoisting Stanley Cups in 2020 and 2021, making the Finals in 2022, and producing the best goals-per-game differential by a team in any five-year period (+0.81 from 2018-22) since the salary cap era began in 2005-06.
But all good things must come to an end, and the Lightning’s reign appeared to be winding down by the conclusion of that stretch. In the 2022 Finals, they were outgunned by an even greater Colorado Avalanche squad — a sign of how many key producers (Kevin Shattenkirk, Tyler Johnson, Yanni Gourde, Carter Verhaeghe, J.T. Miller, etc.) the franchise had already lost from its peak of just a few years earlier. Tampa started slipping further as it weathered injuries and bid farewell to even more pillars; the Bolts sunk from No. 1 in the Elo ratings in both 2020 and 2021 and No. 2 in 2022 to No. 10 in 2023 and No. 11 in 2024.
The toughest blows of all came last spring and summer. In the playoffs, the Lightning were matched in Round 1 against the cross-state rival Florida Panthers, a team they had thoroughly humiliated in a decisive 2022 sweep. Two years later, though, the tougher and more battle-tested Cats turned the tables, opening up a 3-0 series lead and crushing Tampa 6-1 to eliminate them in Game 5. Then, 64 days later, 16-year veteran and team captain Steven Stamkos left the team via free agency to sign with the Nashville Predators.
With that, the greatest era in Lightning history — and the shining example that most validated the NHL’s multi-decade push to emphasize Sun Belt hockey — seemed to be over, or at least permanently diminished. Only six of the top 18 players by Goals Above Replacement on the cup-winning 2019-20 Bolts (Nikita Kucherov, Victor Hedman, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Brayden Point, Anthony Cirelli and Erik Cernak) were still with the club ahead of this season.
But in a surprising twist, the Lightning haven’t continued their slide this year. In fact, they rank sixth in Elo and are No. 2 in Hockey-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS) rankings, trailing only the equally stunning reversal story of the Washington Capitals. Tampa Bay’s dynasty days might be far from over, as it turns out.
How has coach Jon Cooper’s squad done it?
An improved defensive corps with newcomers J.J. Moser (before his injury) and Ryan McDonagh (in his second tour of Tampa duty) has helped, and a bounceback campaign by goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy — from arguably the worst season of his career1 to a more typical above-average performance — has boosted the Lightning from just 22nd in fewest goals per game allowed in 2023-24 to ninth in 2024-25.
But the Bolts’ biggest improvement isn’t even on that side of the puck. On offense, Tampa Bay is averaging the most goals per game in the NHL, the team’s best placement since leading the league back-to-back in 2018-19 and 2019-20.
Out on the wing, Kucherov is currently tracking for the best season of his career — with 30.2 adjusted GAR — which is really saying something, considering he’s had 22.0 or more adjusted GAR in six of the past eight seasons he’s played (and counting).2 Kucherov’s famously shifty game earned him MVP honors in 2019, and it could happen again this season. And just like in the old days, he’s far from Tampa’s only threat.
Each of the Lightning’s top five forwards — Kucherov (30.2), Brayden Point (28.2), Brandon Hagel (25.2), Jake Guentzel (23.1) and Anthony Cirelli (21.0) — skates above 20.0 adjusted GAR, combining for 127.8 adjusted GAR in total. If that trend persisted, Tampa Bay’s leading forwards would rank as the most prolific group in the history of the NHL:
We’re not even halfway through the schedule, and regression is real, so Tampa Bay probably won’t quite stay No. 1 as the season progresses. (Magnificent Mario Lemieux and the ‘96 Pens will probably be safe.) But the fact that the Lightning are even in the conversation right now speaks to how well Tampa’s offense has been clicking.
When the Bolts were suffering one salary-cap casualty after another as they tried to keep their rapidly dwindling Stanley Cup core together, it was easy to write them off as team whose best days were behind them. But much like the game’s previous dynasty, the Chicago Blackhawks, Tampa Bay has been shrewd about keeping the players they need — and letting go of the ones they don’t (even when it hurts) — in order to reload and keep the contending window open.
🧊 Will the 4 Nations Feature Peak Team USA?
For American hockey fans of a certain age (e.g., my age), the U.S. team that upset Canada to win the 1996 World Cup of Hockey will hold a special place in our hearts as arguably the greatest collection of players to ever wear the red, white, and blue:
(With apologies to the 1980 Miracle on Ice squad, the ‘96 team featured all NHL players in their primes, a number of them future Hall of Famers. And though the pro-laden 2010 Olympic team came about as close as it gets to also winning gold, they lost to the rival Canadians in the end — leaving ‘96 as the only American team to win gold at a major international competition with NHL players.)
So when I was in the car listening to SiriusXM NHL Network Radio, hearing one of the hosts arguing that the 2025 U.S. team recently selected for the upcoming 4 Nations Face-Off was superior to the 1996 squad, I was skeptical. Sure, Jack Hughes, Auston Matthews, Quinn Hughes and Connor Hellebuyck are great — but are they better than Brian Leetch, Brett Hull, Mike Richter and one of personal favorite players ever, Mike Modano?
Pfft. Not likely.
However, upon crunching the numbers, I might have been wrong. At the very least, this 4 Nations roster has a chance to be as great as the 1996 version, if not even greater.
To measure the talent on each roster, I looked at Adjusted GAR — both in the most recent season and a weighted average over the previous three seasons — for the top 23 players3 on American teams in tournaments with NHL players since the fall of the Soviet Union. That gave us 10 Teams USA to choose from, of which the 2025 edition is, statistically, the best:
Perhaps blinded by nostalgia, I was discounting how well the recent generation of American stars have been playing relative to their predecessors from three decades earlier:
Remember, GAR is designed to be era-independent,4 so the fact that 1996 came at the dawn of the Dead Puck Era is not driving the lower numbers for ‘90s star forwards like Doug Weight, Bill Guerin, etc. Those players were younger than their counterparts in 2025, which explains some of the difference, but that’s also part of the point — this year’s Team USA is very much in its prime (not too old, not too young) and it features players with histories of being extremely productive.
(And like our Lightning forwards from the previous section, some of the current Americans are benefiting from early-season stats that will likely regress a bit — though if that were a decisive factor, we would not expect the current team’s lead over the field to be greater in the multi-year form of GAR, which already accounts for regression to some extent.)
This is not meant to serve as definitive proof that 2025’s 4 Nations roster is the best men’s Team USA ever. But it certainly stands out by this method of accounting. In my mind, I would take the top players on the left over the top players on the right, but that’s probably because I absolutely idolized the guys on the left. The kids on the right — well, they’re mostly not even kids anymore, and they can skate, shoot, pass, defend and save with the best groups that America has ever produced. All that’s left is for them to win like the ‘96 squad did.
Filed under: NHL, Hockey, Hockey Bytes
Out of the 62 netminders with at least 20 starts, he ranked 44th in Goals Saved Above Average.
Not including the 2020-21 regular season, which Kucherov missed in its entirety.
13 forwards, 7 defensemen and 3 goalies — except in the case of the 1998 Olympic team, which carried 12, 8 and 3.
Such that 50% of all leaguewide value belongs to offense, 40% to defense and 10% to goaltending.